Small desktop printers have provided high speed reliable pick mechanisms for feeding office size sheet media into a media path leading to a print zone. But large format printers of D and E size have typically required cumbersome and slow initialization procedures for feeding a leading edge of media all the way past the print zone, and then performing various steps of re-alignment. Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to redesign the entry path for incoming sheet and rollfeed media in order to simplify and make more reliable the feeding of a leading edge of media into engagement with a pick-roller on the printer.